Those mobile internet stick thingies
 

I'm just about to move back in time to a world of no broadband/high speed internet. Bell have offered me a "turbostick" to plug into my PC as an alternative ("It's very fast" the man on the other end of my phone told me). It's $30 a month on a two year contract and I get 500 megs included in that. I suspect I'll go over that somewhat with a MOTD off UKNova four times a month and what not.
Anybody got one?
Any good?
Very expensive?

Re: Those mobile internet stick thingies
 

I got one to use through work for when I am up at the cabin etc - It gets you out of a jam and you can find the footy scores and the like but i found it not so good for watching streams etc Knowing my company they more than likely bought the cheapest one / package going so I would wait on more advice before writing the idea off

Re: Those mobile internet stick thingies
 

I have one of those which I use when I'm in France for the summers. But it's no contract PAYG once you've forked out about $100 to buy the dongle (I think it's cheaper now, this was 3 or 4 years ago).

3 euros an hour (~$5) for using the bugger though, although no limits on capacity.

If you've gotta do it, you gotta do it, but it's still a rip-off. For me though the alternative is a 12 month contract with orange.fr or equivalent, even more expensive.

Re: Those mobile internet stick thingies
 

Bell wanted $130 for me to buy one with no contract. Not entirely sure how the billing would have worked with that though. Of course it's "free" :rolleyes: with a two year contract which I've reluctantly said yes to in the face of no other options it appears. 3 euros an hour - ouch. Imagine if you start downloading something and seeds diminish... Would cost you a fortune. :ohmy:

Re: Those mobile internet stick thingies
 

Where roughly are you going...here in Ottawa, there is a company called 'xplornet' or something like that which is high speed for rural areas and covers many of the outlying areas...it is line of sight satellite so I think you need to clamp on a dish to the outside of your house...is there such a thing where you are going.?

I would avoid giving Bell any of my money...I've had nothing but bad experiences with them.

Re: Those mobile internet stick thingies
 

Yes. It's OK for checking business e-mail and on line banking and such. But ludicrously impractical for messing about on here or downloading video streams etc.

I don't do the latter a lot anyway.

Re: Those mobile internet stick thingies
 

Line of sight and satellite are two different mechanisms. I had satellite here, the dish is still on the roof. That was expensive to set up ($850 iirc) and to run $130/month. When it worked it was usable for text based applications such as email and posting here but not fast enough for downloading or streaming video. It was very weather prone, failing for wind, rain and snow. The supplier, Bruce Telecom, no longers offers it to new customers but did offer excellent support for the offering.

I now have line of sight, sold as Bell Rural, it's marginally faster and a lot more reliable. It's still slow enough though to make anyone used to cable or ADSL scream. There's no technical support. Even billing queries are difficult to resolve since no on at Bell seems to have heard of the service. Whether or not it's available depends on the exact sight of the house and the sending units, there's no dish but a white panel, maybe 9" square, aimed at the sending unit.

Visitors here have demonstrated that the sticks work but they've only accessed one site each to show how fast it is before closing their computers on grounds of cost.

Re: Those mobile internet stick thingies
 

3g Turbo Stick Novatel wireless U760 USB modem is the one I have - I dont think there is much turbo about it :blink:

Re: Those mobile internet stick thingies
 

The system that I've seen on the outskirts of Ottawa, Explornet, sounds like Bell Rural when you mention a 9" square white panel.

http://www.xplornet.com/index.aspx

Re: Those mobile internet stick thingies
 

I have read horror stories about xplorenet. Living out in the country (and having more than one computer) we decided to go with rogers rocket hub thingie. Works really well for us, it's creates it's own wireless network. So visitors can go online, it also allows us to place it in a position in the house that gets the best reception. I find it fast, comparable to cogeco cable's speeds.

Downfall is that although they say 30 dollars...it depends how much you use it. We typically use 10gigs a month ($70), and at the moment we are at 9.5 gigs. So are having to use the internet sparingly to avoid additional charges.
10gigs is not a lot of usage really.
That said, unlike dial up I can check my email, facebook, and it doesn't take all afternoon. You can also make skype calls with video (we have our vonage phone plugged into it as well).
I would put that it is portable so going to the cottage we can take it, but the cottage has high speed access...crazy but true. Guess American tourists are more important than people who live in Ontario.

Re: Those mobile internet stick thingies
 

Your experience is the exact inverse of mine :lol:

We have just switched from our fixed-wireless/microwave line of site system because it was so unreliable (affected both by even mildly poor weather and by interference from any other 2.4GHz equipment that people happened to be using in the area) and have moved over to Xplornet satellite. While it is horrendously expensive ($119.99 p/m for our package (the cheapest available is $59.99, I believe) - compared to $40 p/m for our old system, and there was a $1100 set up fee :eek: !) it's worked perfectly through torrential rain and severe thunder storms that would have definitely caused our fixed-wireless system to give up the ghost.

I believe our old provider was spectacularly incompetent, though, and it was more to do with them not having a clue, than any inherent weakness in the technology of fixed-wireless. I know plenty of people who have had reliable internet connections using that method - just not through this area's only provider :(

Speed with the satellite internet is nothing to write home about (1.6Mb download rate) but it's good enough to allow viewing of Youtube without buffering, which is more than can be said of our time with our last ISP...

Re: Those mobile internet stick thingies
 

Perhaps placement and alignment is key, waving trees upset the satellite but not the line-of-sight panel. One quirk of the satellite I rather liked was that the internet thought I was in Chicago, "Canada only" things didn't work, "not in Canada" things did.

Re: Those mobile internet stick thingies
 

Oh but the trees didn't even have to be waving to upset our line-of-site transceiver...they could be totally stationary, but simply have too many leaves on at the moment (ermm - we're surrounded by *pine* trees guys??!!) or it could be affected by "the sap rising" at certain times of the year... I kid you not - the amount of BS this ISP came out with to "explain" why our connection was so unreliable was utterly amazing :frown:

Our dish is fixed onto the tin-roof of an outbuilding, on a very sturdy tripod-type structure, and so is too high to have any obstacles in the way of it's view of the satellite, and very high winds have not managed to shift it out of alignment yet... Snow build up is going to be our biggest issue, I imagine. We usually rectify that problem on our Bell dish by chucking snowballs up at it until we dislodge enough to get the TV picture back, but I think we might need a less brutish solution for removing snow off this dish.

Re: Those mobile internet stick thingies
 

When I say that the satellite provider had excellent technical support, I mean it. They isolated the offending frond then moved their van under it so I could climb on it and then up the tree in order to lop that branch off. I felt quite guilty about ending my subscription even though the alternative was cheaper and better, for me at least.

I see nothing about rising sap on their FAQ page but then they don't bolt their gubbins to maple trees.

Re: Those mobile internet stick thingies
 

Ok - having had 4 months of my "turd-o-stick" I can advise you all that if you are a light internet user, then it may be an option. No surprise there.

However - it's not easy to keep track of usage.

As I have just discovered with my most recent bill.

$360...


...for a month.

I apparently went 5gb over the 5gb ($75) line and paid 5 cents a megabyte. Apart from the bits I don't understand where I was seemingly charged $10 or $15 per mb.

This is for a product which drops the connection all the time and two weeks ago ended up being hurled across the room in frustration, ending up in a baseboard heater.

It now looks a bit melted but still works.